Elie Wiesel to deliver address on death penalty at Wesleyan

Published 12:00 am, Friday, October 22, 2010

Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel will deliver an address on the death penalty on Tuesday, Oct.26, at 7 p.m. at Wesleyan University, Memorial Chapel, 221 High St., Middletown.

Wiesel, a Nobel Peace Laureate and award-winning author who survived the Nazi death camps, will make his first-ever detailed public address on use of the death penalty. Wiesel's lecture is entitled "Building an Ethical Society: The Death Penalty and Human Dignity." It will be a departure from Wiesel's well-known lectures on the Holocaust.

"With every cell of my being and with every fiber of my memory I oppose the death penalty in all forms," Wiesel has said in news accounts. "I do not believe any civilized society should be at the service of death. I don't think it's human to become an agent of the Angel of Death."

In his Connecticut lecture, Professor Wiesel is expected to speak from the perspective of a person who knows what it means to have loved ones murdered, but rather than seeking retribution through the death penalty, the need for civilized societies to seek peace and atonement, and to recognize the dignity in all of humanity.